Anne Amie Vineyards, Carlton Oregon

Duex Vert 2006

More beautiful pinot noir from Mike and Patti Green's Duex Vert vineyard - gorgeous! This time it's Pommard clone.

Kinky Boots

Sorting out less-than-perfect grape bunches is an extremely important part of making great wine. We often have four or more sorters closely examining each bunch. Retail sales director Kim McLeod was caught on the sorting line the other day wearing boots a little different than the standard black "Muck" boots favored by the crew. We're hoping the wine from this day will have even more "style" than usual.

Harvest Meals

Harvest season brings long days to our crew. The work day often goes from dawn to the middle of the night and sixteen hour days become the norm. At Anne Amie we want to be sure our crew is well fed during these long days and twice a day we sit down for a home cooked meal. Menus ranges from American to Italian and Mexican cuisine as we try to please everyone. Pictured here the harvest and office crew dine on lasagna.

Everybody "Punching" In

The harvest means everybody needs to pitch in (or punch-in in this case). Pictured above, Retail Sales Director Kim McLeod punches down a 1-ton fermenter of pinot noir. This is a tough job and after a few fermenters your arms feel like rubber. You don't need to visit the health club on days you punch down! Punching down keeps the "cap" (the grapes skins) moist, healthy and clean during fermentation as must be done two or three times a day.

Grape Nirvana

This morning the grapes arrived from the Deux Vert Vineyard, our close neighbor here in the Yamhill-Carlton AVA. As you can see from the photo above (pinot noir clone 1018) this vineyard produced fabulous fruit this year. Like most of the vineyards in this area, Deux Vert has yielded a crop with good quantity and the unique combination of high sugar and high acids. The perfect weather is continuing with warm, sunny dry days and very cool nights. We are exceptionally excited by the quality of fruit coming into the winery.

Pinot Gris

At the crack of dawn this morning our pinot gris arrived from the Del Rio Vineyard in southern Oregon. We whole-cluster press our pinot gris, meaning that the entire bunch of grapes goes into the press. This process, while very time consuming, yields a more brilliant and explosively fruity pinot gris. Many people are surprised to find out that the pinot gris grapes we use to make a white wine are almost as dark as our pinot noir grapes.  Pictured left are pinot gris grapes just before they go into the press. Above the crush crew sorts the pinot gris as it is loaded into the press.

Christening the Vintage

Winemaker Scott Huffman celebrates the start of our harvest last Tuesday with the wonderful sparkling wine of our neighbor over in Dundee, Argyle. This marks Scott's twenty-fourth vintage here in the Willamette Valley. The grapes are pinot noir from our Boisseau Vineyard.

Pickin' Pinot!

This morning we are picking our Boisseau Vineyard pinot noir on the Chehalem Mountains and this afternoon start with our Lafayette Vineyards pinot noir here at the winery. Everything is ready to pick now so it will be a race to get everything in the winery as soon as possible. We can expect a lot of late nights as we process all the fruit and get it in the fermenters the same day it's picked. The fruit quality looks very good with almost no gray rot.

The beautiful weather continues with warm 80 degree temperatures and warm, dry breezes. The valley is alive with everyone picking everything.

The Sun is Teasing Us

It's teasing us.

You can almost see it: the sun! After these days of gray skies and rain, we can feel it coming.

Yes, the weather report is for glorious sunshine, 80+ temperatures and dry breezes over the next ten days. This should be enough to get our grapes where they need to be.

Although spraying for botrytis would be the easy solution, Scott has decided to not spray, "Would you want that in the wine you're drinking?" he noted. I could not agree more. As the vintage has given us plenty of fruit, it would be much better to throw away some bunches that get infected with botrytis rather than douse the entire crop with things we don't want in the wine. That's what low impact agriculture is all about.

This is the great advantage of Scott's long experience here in the Willamette Valley, you can depend he won't overreact to the whims of nature. His knowledge allows us to reach for our goal of producing terroir driven wines not overwhelmed by over manipulation in the vineyard or winery - a goal Scott and I completely share, but something difficult to accomplish without his level of experience.

I just returned from a walk through the vineyards and the bunches look beautiful with little botrytis to be found. Scott has the crew out removing any unripe or imperfect bunches so the soon to arrive sunshine, that is only teasing us now, has only the finest bunches left to ripen.

Crush is finally really about to arrive - and it looks like it will be a sunny one!

Make Up Your Mind

It's a rainy day.

No, it's a sunny day.

Wait, it's a foggy day.

Hey, now it's a sunny day.

No, it's a rainy day.

All of these days happened on my short commute to the winery over Chehalem Mountain this morning. The weather has become schizophrenic. Let's just say the weather is not great for grapes.

Oregon Vineyard Services (OVS) is recommending spraying for botrytis and predicting five or six more days of this moody weather. However, if the sun comes out after that all this will be quickly forgotten. We expect to start harvesting pinot noir in about ten days.

(pictured above: this morning's weather)